Mills College to end degree programs
Oakland liberal arts school will stop admissions after fall semester, confer final degrees in 2023
Left financially reeling from the COVID-19 pandemic, Mills College officials announced Wednesday that the historic women’s college will stop admitting new students after fall 2021 and confer its last undergraduate and graduate degrees in 2023.
The decision comes after years of multimillion-dollar deficits and declining enrollment, which were exacerbated by the pandemic, said President Elizabeth Hillman.
Facing a $3 million deficit against a $50 million budget, Hillman said it had become clear that “we can’t actually continue to fulfill Mills’ mission in its current form.” But Hillman said the decision to stop admitting new students won’t lead to Mills closing its picturesque 135-acre Oakland Hills campus — home to the college since 1871 — anytime soon.
For the next two years, faculty will continue to run undergraduate and graduate classes as Mills works to transform from an independent liberal arts college into an institute. Hillman said details of this new entity are being worked out — as in whether Mills could become some kind of think tank or otherwise employ faculty, educate students or run programs for the larger community.
For the students who enter Mills in the fall or who remain at Mills over the next two years, the school will work to ensure their transfer to other universities.
“The mission of Mills is more important than ever,” Hillman said, explaining that an institute will do “what Mills has long done: promote women’s leadership, advance gender and racial equity and promote critical and creative thinking. Those things are tremendously important now. We’re looking for a way to continue Mills’ legacy in a form that we can actually sustain.”
Mills has distinguished itself in recent years by recruiting students of color
from surrounding communities and for its progressive approach to transgender students. It also has held to its commitment to limit its undergraduate education to women. Men have been able to enroll in its graduate programs.
When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, Mills immediately reverted to remote learning like other campuses across the Bay Area and the United States. More than half of Mills’ 500 residential students left campus. The pandemic’s economic fallout also forced some of its 960 students, a large number of whom are first-generation undergraduates or who rely on financial aid, to withdraw from the school altogether.
The existential challenges facing Mills are not unique. Experts say small, private colleges, especially those in rural areas, have been struggling for years. Across San Francisco Bay, Notre Dame de Namur University, a 170-year-old private Catholic institution in Belmont, staved off possible closure by shifting its focus from undergraduates to offering graduate and online programs.
Mills declared a “financial emergency” in 2017 with a $9 million deficit, eliminating such majors as philosophy and Latin American studies and laying off even tenured faculty. The college also slashed the cost of its undergraduate tuition by 36% — from $44,765 to $28,765 in the 2018-19 year — to make Mills more affordable.
But Hillman acknowledged that the tuition reduction didn’t attract enough new students. A program to partner with UC Berkeley to share degrees and student housing also was undermined by the pandemic, Hillman added.
Graduates and others were saddened by the news.
“I found my deep purpose at Mills for education and for public policy,” said Lateefah Simon, president of the Oakland-based civil rights organization Akonadi Foundation. Simon serves on BART’s board of directors and is a member of the board of trustees for the California State University system. She said she thrived in the small classes taught by dedicated professors and was permitted to take breaks in her studies to raise her two daughters. She finished her degree in 2018, the same year her oldest daughter also graduated from Mills.
Simon added the Mills’ unique learning environment partly came from the value it put “on justice, equity, inclusion and feminist power.”
Mills started as a “young ladies seminary” in Benicia in 1852 and moved to Oakland in 1871, where it became chartered as the first women’s college west of the Rockies.
With its history tied to Oakland, Mills became known for its progressive education on gender, race and social justice. Mills became the first independent college to offer an ethnic studies program in 1969 and launched the first transgender admission policy in the country at a women’s college. More than 58% of undergraduates identify as part of the LGBTQ community and 65% are students of color.
Its students over the years have included U.S. Rep. Barbara Lee, D-Oakland; Dixy Lee Ray, the first female governor of Washington; Camila Chavez, co-founder of the Dolores Huerta Foundation; Renel Brooks-Moon, the public address announcer for the San Francisco Giants; and pastry chef Claire Ptak, who made the tradition-breaking wedding cake for Prince Harry and Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex.
Mills’ graduate programs, especially in the arts, also have become a fertile training ground for visual and performing artists, with music alumni including jazz legend Dave Brubeck, composer Steve Reich and Noah Georgeson, a Grammy Award-winning producer, engineer, mixer and musician.